France: A History: from Gaul to de Gaulle

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I am not Caesar, but how often have I dreamed Caesar’s dream! I saw them weeping, I understood their tears. “ Urbem orant.” They want their city! And I, a poor solitary dreamer, what could I give to that great silent nation? All that I had—my voice. May it be their first admission into the City of Right, from which they have been excluded until now! To the Protestants, the essential fact of the Saint-Bartholomew′s Day Massacre toils fifteen days before in Brussels (Granvelle papers, 10 August). Then, so many facts about the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, on which they themselves had thrown very little light. This is the principal point on which I differ from my learned friend, M. Henri Martin. Moreover, t (...)

world’s greatest artists, the geniuses who examine nature with such tender love, will allow me to make here a humble comparison. Have you sometimes seen the touching seriousness of a young girl, innocent, and yet deeply affected by her future motherhood, who cradles the work of her hands, animates it with her kisses, says to it from her heart: My daughter! ... If you touch her work roughly, she becomes upset and screams. But this does not prevent her from knowing deep down who this being is that she animates, enables to talk and to reason, vivifies with her soul. sum up, history, as I saw it represented by those eminent (in several cases admirable) men, still seemed unsubstantial in its two approaches:

CONTENTS.

Amid its commitment to art, an inclination for war, and strong national identity, France has merged a complex culture with many strings attached.

This semi-autobiographical memoir by Ernest Hemingway is set in the roaring ’20s where Hemingway lived, struggling to make a living as a writer and a journalist. Although the book may have been written decades ago, it remains one of the best memoirs about living in France to this day. third volume (1300-1400) examines all aspects of one century. It is not without weaknesses. It does not explain how 1300 was the atonement for 1200, how Boniface VIII paid for Innocent III. It is harsh, excessively so, toward the legists, toward the courageous men who slapped the face of the idol with the Albigensian hand of the valiant Nogaret. However, this volume is new and strong in deriving history principally from the economic Revolution, from the advent of gold, of the Jew and of Satan (the king of hidden treasures). It vigorously presents the very mercantile character of the times. just my first two volumes, I caught a glimpse of the immense perspectives of this terra incognita. I said: “It will take ten years... ” No, twenty; no, thirty... And the road ahead of me grew longer and longer. I did not complain. On exploratory voyages one’s heart enlarges, grows, no longer sees anything but the goal. One forgets oneself entirely. So it happened with me. My fervent pursuit constantly pushing me forward, I lost sight of myself, I withdrew from myself. I let the world pass me by, and I took history for life.more complicated, more terrifying, was the problem I had set for myself as an historian: the resurrection of life in its integrity, not superficially, but in its interior and organic depth. No prudent man would have dreamed of it. Fortunately, that I was not. During that period, leading French intellectuals and political figures prioritized perfect national unity and looked for ways to bequeath all French people with the same language, laws, customs, and values. was in this respect perhaps the freest man in the world, having had the rare advantage of not having endured the deadly education which catches immature young souls, and immediately chloroforms them. For me the Church was a foreign world, an object of pure curiosity, like the moon. What I knew best about that pale star was that its days were numbered, that it did not have long to live. But who would replace it? Such was the question. The Church was caught up in the moral cholera that so closely followed the July Revolution, the disillusionment, and the loss of high hopes. There was a rapid downward movement. The novel, the theater burst forth with daring ugliness. Talent was plentiful, but the brutality was crude; this was not the fecund orgy of the old cults of nature which had its grandeur, but rather a deliberate intoxication with sterile materialism. Much bombast, and little beneath. two volumes were successful and accepted by the public. I was the first to have established France as a person. Less exclusive than Thierry, and subordinating the element of race, I strongly underlined the geographic principle of local influences, and along with that, the shared labor of the entire nation in creating, fabricating itself. In my blind enthusiasm for the Gothic I had caused the stone to give forth blood, and the Church to flower, to rise up like the flower of legend. This pleased the public. It pleased me a good deal less. That work shone like a great flame. I found too much subtlety in it, too much wit, too much system.

began at the time when I was the first to remove history from the vagueness which satisfied them; I established history from records, manuscripts, the enormous investigation of thousands of diverse documents. voices, voices of conscience, which Joan of Arc carries with her into battles, into prisons, against the English, against the Church. There the world is changed. The passive resignation of Christians (so useful to tyrants) is superseded by the heroic tenderness which takes our afflictions to heart, which wants to set God’s justice here below, a justice that acts, that fights, that saves and heals. odd thing is that the only person with enough love to recreate, to remake the Church’s inner world, is the one whom she did not raise at all, who never entered into communion with her, who had no faith other than in humanity itself, no imposed creed, nothing but a free mind.all, not very interested in minute details of erudition, where what is most valuable, perhaps, remained buried in unpublished sources. would have you know, then, ignorant ones, that, unarmed, without a sword, without arguing with those trustful souls who are begging for resurrection, art, while welcoming them and restoring their life’s breath, art nevertheless retains its full lucidity. I do not mean irony, in which many have placed the essence of art. Rather I am speaking of the mighty duality which permits one, while loving them, to see nonetheless what they are, “that they are the dead.” a master with whom I shared, not genius no doubt, but a violent will, upon entering the Louvre (the Louvre of that time, where all Europe’s art was collected), did not seem troubled. He said: “Fine! I’ll do it all over again.” In rapid sketches which he never signed, he went about seizing and appropriating everything. And, were it not for 1815, he would have kept his word. Such are the passions, the madness of youth. While this is a novel, it highlights French concerns for social welfare at the same time he establishes heredity for the staunch national pride France is credited with today.

The narration is informative and full of wit & humor which make the book immensely readable. The entire book is full of character sketches and peppered with interesting anecdotes and stories of kings & other politicians including Robert the Pious, Louis the Fat and Philip the Fair among others. defensive fidelity to his volumes of medieval history can be explained in part by his fundamental attraction to all sorts of spirituality, be they natural, human, or even supernatural. Perhaps a clearer explanation of his compulsion to recall his love of Christianity is his absolute commitment to an organic conception of historical writing. For the author, esthetic integrity became more compelling than ideology or the rectification of details. This has nothing to do with the honesty of the individuals. There were some admirable men, people (...) divine a spectacle when, on the scaffold, the girl, abandoned and alone, upholds her interior Church against the priest-king, against the murderous Church, in the midst of the flames, and takes flight saying: “My voices!” kept my distance from the majestic, sterile Doctrinaires, and from the great Romantic flood of “art for art’s sake.” I had my world within myself. I held my life within myself, as well as my renewals and my fecundity; but also my dangers. Which? My heart, my youth, my very method, and the new demand made of history: no longer just to recount or judge, but to summon, remake, revive the ages. To have enough passionate flame to reheat ashes long cold–that was the first point, and it was not without peril. But the second point, still more perilous perhaps, was to enter into an intimate relationship with the revived dead, and who knows? finally become one of them.Much of the book is located in Provence and The Horseman on the Roofhas since been transformed into a movie starring Juliette Binoche. The original book was published in the 1950s and follows the story of a young Italian nobleman who is residing in France and is trying to raise money for the Italian revolution against Austria in the mid-1800s. The Three Musketeers– by Alexandre Dumas